IBM DB2 Universal Database and RS/6000 Lead the Industry in Business Intelligence Performance
IBM Hardware and Software Best-0f-Breed In Industry-Standard Benchmarks
Somers, N.Y (February 10, 1998) – IBM today announced that it has achieved a series of industry-leading business intelligence performance breakthroughs using its RS/6000 systems and DB2* Universal Database.
Three separate TPC-D benchmark results, which were verified by Transaction Processing Council (TPC) auditors, ranked the RS/6000 and DB2 Universal Database first in their class among hardware and database vendors in price/performance and throughput metrics for 100 gigabytes and a full terabyte of data.
The tests used the IBM RS/6000 SP, RS/6000 Models F50 (332MHz) and H50 and DB2 Universal Database Enterprise-Extended Edition, proving IBM’s ability to meet customers’ demands for powerful business intelligence solutions at the most attractive price points.
Business intelligence — including data warehousing, data mining and on-line analytical processing (OLAP) tools — allows companies to gain additional insights from operational and other data sources. Customers around the world today are using business intelligence systems to make faster, more informed decisions about which markets to enter, which customers to recruit and which products to promote, with the goal of increasing profitability and competitiveness.
Unlike other technical benchmarks, TPC-D tests are focused on complicated business queries. In the real world, the TPC-D test scenario could involve brand managers, marketing managers or business analysts trying to evaluate costs or income for different regions. For example, an analyst trying to study trends and directions at a supermarket might try to look at which products are selling on different shelves, using such factors as the height of the shelf or how much profit is being made per shelf size.
The three metrics in the TPC-D benchmark include:
Power — the ability to give a single user the best response time.
Throughput — the amount of work put through a system in a given amount of time.
Price/performance — total system price divided by composite query-per-hour rating.
The TPC-D multi-user throughput performance metric *** of 5155.4 QthD at a database volume of one terabyte surpassed that of all other vendors. At the 100-gigabyte level, IBM surpassed all single node results in all three metrics. All benchmark results achieved top ranking in the overall price-performance metric.
“With these latest results, IBM has demonstrated that the combination of the RS/6000 and DB2 Universal Database, the most powerful, scalable database for business intelligence, provides the best possible performance results in the business-crucial TPC-D benchmark,” said Hershel Harris, manager, database technology, IBM Software Solutions. “Further, the benchmark on the SP was run in multi-user mode, demonstrating the power of this combination in a real business environment.”
Source: IBM